All the PR data you can eat - without getting indigestion

In the next few months, I and some friends will be creating a new resource for PR practitioners, evaluation companies and academics (and a lot of other people too).

The idea is really quite simple.

If you could search online for all media (that includes all kinds of media from Twitter to the Telegraph) stories and comments about your organisation everyday (or hour, week, month, year etc) and put them in a database, spreadsheet, list or a web page that would be pretty average, but useful. If you could do the same about competitors, market sectors, business partners or individuals such as journalists, Wikipedians, FB friends that might be useful too. We are going to make this happen.

Each article (citation), will have a lot of information attached to it. We have some indication via Alexa, of  the age, sex and location of readers. We will also add all we know from Google Trends and Google Analytics that there is a lot more information that attaches to stories, blog posts and online comments. We will collect it  (and more) all and attach it to your story's URL.

Of course, it will be useful to be able to extract the text (without the HTML mark-up and advertisements)  and make it searchable, summarise-able and with lists of tags, mark-ups, semantic concepts (ranked in order of significance), Parts of Speech and hyper-links in and out. So we will add them also so you can use the information if you need to.

Now comes your part.

We will make these data available to you. The full set. Via an API, spreadsheet and a range of other formats so that you can download just what (that is, only the data and no more or less) you want. Yes, that's right, we will collect it, but you don't have to use it. So, if all you want is a news feed every day that's OK. If you want international trends by the hour, that's cool too. You can choose to smell the ocean or sip from the fire-hose.

Now you will be able to make your own news apps, evaluation apps and subject specific web news outlets.

You will be able to match media data with business data (enquiries, sales requests for information etc etc - anything you want). Making a list of Twitter users mentioning your brand will be as easy and that list of blogs mentioning your competitors or Slideshare mentions about your CSR programme. All the information will be ready for you to mine.

We will offer an API that any friendly programmer can use to make you anything you want.

We will offer some tools too. A de-duplication tool will be useful so that you can set up your own de-duplication parameters (all those re-tweets can be counted without having to edit every one) and a smart curation capability would, we guess, be helpful too.

Perhaps you have some ideas as to what you would like to include in our data set (mentions in Facebook ? - we're onto it).

If you are in-house, an agency or an academic PR, or evaluation company or research organisation and you want to be a beta tester, or early adopter, we will be delighted to talk you through what we have in mind to do.

In due course we shall be holding open events and application developer seminars but all that is for the future.

Right now we aim to offer a simple, though significant service.

Six years later, we are talking about value

I was watching Derek Halpern talk about blog posts on YouTube and he suggested re-visiting old posts. I did.
The oldest talked about valuing relationships.

Here it is:

We have moved on. In six years, we have some better views:

Now, of course we are getting closer to having a form of ROI which I outlined in June.

In this instance, I did propose a form of valuation that would be effective for all types of PR and which would provide a value for public relations. We do have tools that can help with this approach and that would be useful.

So now who is going to work on creating some real (Open Source) facilities for the PR industry to share to be able to measure its effects?

Measuring and evaluating

As we get closer to the new academic term, I thought it may be helpful for students to take a look at how they can examine the work they have been involved in during this gap year.

We have moved past the time when a PR practitioner could imagine that he or she has delivered anything of worth if it is not available online. Getting some sense as its effect, even effectiveness may mean using any number of services.

Of course there are a host of tools out there which can be used but it may be very useful to have a quick look at the range of different tools and approaches that can be used.

Now, this is not a game about 'evaluating PR' - whatever that may mean. This is not about outputs and outcomes. It is all about how internet technologies, aided by people, have represented the activities of an organisation in a range of ways. Its more complicated than traditional PR evaluation which has been stuck in the mud of counting column inches for far too long.

Perhaps the first task is to look at some of the tools available. The broaden the mind.

A close examination may offer an insight into the ones that will shed light and the ones that will shed confusion.

So many claims and so little transparency is not helpful.

The next thing to do is to determined what  each service offers. What, information, for example is provided and what is its value to a communications expert.

Perhaps then, it would be time to see if we can offer insights to the practitioner in order to aid decision making about activities with measurable outcomes.

The list I offer is gleaned from bookmarks created over the years (so some links may not work). They are about tools that can offer a wide range of data .

Here, then, is the first column of your spread sheet!

• 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools
• 27 Twitter Tools To Help You Find And Manage Followers
• 6 Websites to Track A Website’s Traffic
• A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions
• Advanced Google Alerts Buzz Management :: Monitor Blogs, Social Media & Online Reputation :: AlertRank
• Analytics
• blekko | slashtag search
• Blogging software for the business world | Compendium Blogware
• Bsg.co.uk - Bsg
• Conducting A Social Media Audit
• CrowdControlHQ: Overview | LinkedIn
• Demographics Prediction: Audience Intelligence: adCenter Labs
• DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google
• Find Out Your First Follower, First Tweet and Other Twitter Firsts
• Google for Advertisers - Home
• Google Insights for Search
• Google Realtime Search
• Google Trends
• Hellotxt - Read. Update. Organize.
• Here is the Youtube presentation from #sascon - jamescrawford's posterous
• Home | Quantcast
• How To Backup Your Twitter Archive
• How to use automated tweets on Twitter to efficiently market your business | The Efficiency Coach
• http://bloggerfinder.appspot.com/
• http://infochimps.com
• http://klout.com
• http://peerindex.net
• http://www.backtype.com/
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - Web Analytics Blog
• Open Site Explorer Link Analysis
• Opinion research
• Ping.fm / Update all of your social networks at once!
• PRFilter™ - finding stories for you
• publicasity.co.uk | WooRank
• Publigram
• Quarkbase metrix
• SAS | Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Software
• SEOmoz | Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics
• Sign in to Yahoo!
• Site Explorer - Search Results
• so this is mass communication?
• Social media gets blame for PR disasters | Sherrilynne Starkie
• Social Media Monitoring Tools Evaluation
• StatusNet | Open Source microblogging service
• TagCrowd - make your own tag cloud from any text
• Ten great web apps for marketers | Econsultancy
• The influence of Twitter and your Twitter influence - Airfoil Public Relations
• theclarityconcept.pbworks.com
• Tickery - Explore Twitter with FluidDB
• Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business
• Top 5 Search Engines from May 09 to Jun 10 | StatCounter Global Stats
• Top 5 real time search engines
• TouchGraph | Products: Navigator
• TTN
• Viral, Social, Sentiment, Mobile: 4 Cool Web Analytics Tools | Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Website Grader - SEO Tool - Report For www.laithwaites.co.uk
• website traffic spy
• Welcome » PostRank
• WHOIS Lookup and Domain Name Search | DomainTools.com
• WhoLinksToMe: Reputation Management Reimagined
• Wikipedia Search Engine WikiSeek Launches
• WooRank | Website analysis tool
• wow.ly
• www.webliquidgroup.com/assets/robots/Marketers_Social_Media_Monitoring_Survey_2011.pdf
• Your Checklist of Public Relations Measurement Checklists - The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Oh, yes and here are some old pages I produced four years ago:

Return on Values

Yesterday, I began to  look at ROI in a slightly different way and Philip Sheldrake and Tim Marklein maintained the argument for staying with a financial measure of public relations based on cash investment providing an incremental cash return.

For some PR trades, this is a perfectly adequate. One press release reaches a readership of a million people who in turn repay the client the cost of the press release and then some. The effect on the relationship between the organisation and the readers as well as tertiary publics such as journalists, editors and the process of WOM is ignored. Crude, better than nothing and informing management very little about effect.

Lets see if we can improve on that.

Suppose the PR practitioner was to ask the client:

• "Do you have values?"
• "Does your organisation have values?"
• "Do you invest time explaining, even re-enforcing, your values and the organisation's values to the Board?"
• "Do you and the Board invest time explaining your values and the organisation's values to your shareholders, employees, customers, vendors and other stakeholders?"
• "Do you use your values and the organisation's values to single out your brands among consumers/customers?"

I think that most managers would agree that their values and the values of the organisation are very significant competitive differentiators and that valued have value.

Now, lets make this harder. What if you ask the CEO:

• "What is the Return on Investment from your values and the values of the organisation?"

Ummm......

Now, in PR, we do have the answer.

Not marketers, not accountants, not business gurus.

Although many do recognise values as important even if they are not really sure how to identify values I cite: Charles Handy, Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg plus L Chen - 2009; H Donker 2008; M Chong 2010; J Cambra-Fierro & Y Polo-Redondo 2008; NL Trapp 2010 etc. etc).

In PR, grounded research (much better research than brand mangers have - and explained in this post), show that, among different segments of the public, there are drivers that build relationships between them and the organisation. They take the values of the organisation and where those values coincide with personal or group values, they find an affinity with the organisation.

An organisation can be described as a nexus of values and, to extent that they chime with the values of people or groups, there is a coincidence of interest.

We also know from a range of research and academic writing that organisations need to be able to understand the affinity between consumers and brand values to be effective and successful.

I cite, for example: JN Kapferer 2008; S Boo, J Busser, 2009; KL Keller & T Apéria 2008; S Srinivasan 2009; N Mizik & R Jacobson 2008; AE Cretu 2007; J Kim & JD Morris 2008 ....

For PR, deeper and more relevant measurement is to be able to identify the Return on organisational Values.

Does the organisation understand the values of its constituents? Does the organisation have values that chime with its constituency and in explications of its values, is it creating, sustaining and enriching positive relationships.

There is significant literature which explores the concept of Return on Values and much of the literature touches on matters like ethics, trust and reputation.

I cite for example: P van Beurden 2011; KS Cameron 2006; DA Waldman & MS de Luque 2006 LL Nash 2010 etc.

With rich, sustainable and supportive relationships, organisations will prosper both in the short and long term.

The return on investment in having clear, relevant, supportive and mutually acceptable values with the organisational constituency is a great deal more than cash out and cash-plus back. Yes, there is cash-plus back today but also cash-plus back tomorrow and with wider audiences. The real ROI will be seen to deliver real shareholder value, lower cost of doing business, a stable workforce with lower recruitment cost, enhanced vendor relationships and a more supportive licence to operate (Keller, Handy, etc etc).


Return on Values seems to be a much more sensible way of measuring PR.


Image from http://thefinancialbrand.com.

Can PR use ROI as a form of measurement? Its harder than you think

This week three academics have presented challenges to the PR academic community.

Professor Tom Watson at Bournemouth, Richard Bailey at Leeds Metropolitan University and my co author Philip Young at Sunderland have all made interesting contributions to PR thinking ahead of the the CIPR’s new Research and Development Unit (R&DU)  meeting next week.

Before entering into the debate on Grunigian theory presented by Richard and Philip, I wanted to respond to Tom's point.

Tom makes a point: "I still have doubts as to whether ROI, other than in a strictly financial format, can be re-purposed into a more general expression of value creation or contribution to organisational efficiency.  Business managers understand what ROI is, so why would they accept a mixed-concept PR ROI."

It is important. As AMEC boldly goes for some form of measurement of PR providing a return on investment. There seems to be a belief that ROI is a simple idea.

It would seem there is a belief that ROI is a financial measure. Of course it is not. ROI is a profoundly Public Relations measure.

Lets have a look at what ROI is. It is defined in accounting terms as:

(Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment) divided by (Cost of Investment)

Can we pause for a moment and explore what 'Investment' means. Investment requires that an organisation has cash flow, capital reserves or some other asset that can be deployed as an investment.

Organisations comprise three principle assets: capital, proprietary process and/or service and  relationships. The acquisition of capital, and development of process or service; 'vision, mission and corporate objectives' (Kaplan 2001) are a function of relationships.

It follows that to invest in anything, an organisation needs relationships of a nature that can be invested.

So lets re-draw what ROI means:

(Gain from Relationships minus Cost of Relationships) divided by (Cost of Relationships).

ROI is profoundly about relationships. In an industry called 'Public Relations', this could be of interest. In a sector called 'marketing communications' it will be pivotal because Marcoms depends on 'public relation' to optimise relationships to create capital and cash flow to pay for this, a special area of relationship management, namely marketing. In principle the same applies to the trade of 'Corporate Affairs' and other trades associated with 'Public Relations' in practice.

Which takes us back to Richard and Philip and the Grunigian excellence model coming from systems theory. We can, if we desire stay with the systems theory view because already have a grounded reserach into the nature of relationships in the work of Bruno Amaral (2009).

This, Amaral, hypothesis is that relationships  are formed at the nexus of values and using latenet semantic analysis was able to show that where there is a nexus of semantic values there is very strong evidence that they are central to the formation of convergent relationships.This empirical research supports conclusions as to the impact of public relations as relationship management offered, by  Ledingham and Bruning (2002).

Convergent values relationships have some resonance with the Grunigian position of Publics forming round issues but in the Amaral study, it was less issues as values that were key which is a broader construct.

What we have done is to extend and develop the ideas of Grunig and Ledingham and Bruning to identify an empirically based idea of what public relations can be which accommodates both theoretical perspectives.

Can we now re-draw ROI yet again.

(Gain from Nexus of Values minus Cost of Nexus of Values) divided by (Cost of Nexus of Values).

Of course, I have only taken one view as to the nature of relationships namely the empirical research of Bruno Amaral. There will be others drawn from Psychology to the Evolutionary Sciences.

What I hope to have shown is that the theoretical concepts of Public Relations have moved on and that we can, should we wish, pursue ROI but that it will require more than an AMEC Commission to come to any meaningful conclusion unless there is a great deal more by way of, notably academic, research.

And the there is the problem of getting such ideas into the heads of the PR industry's clients. But that is another story.









RS Kaplan  Nonprofit management and Leadership, 2001 - Wiley Online Library

Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, 1992  IABC Research Foundation Edited by James E. Grunig

Relationship management in public relations: dimensions of an organization-public relationship (1992) John A. Ledingham and Stephen D. Bruning Public Relations Review Volume 24, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 55-65

The search for hidden meanings

Throughout written history, people have engaged in finding the hidden meaning in writing.

Fascination at the hieroglyphs on the walls ancient Egyptian temples and burial sites extends back well before  4 PM on November 26, 1922 when Howard Carter’s search for hidden meanings resulted in the discovery of the 3300 year old and untouched tomb of 19 years old king Tutankhamun .

Today, we are even more fascinated with exploring our written (and spoken) language.

And it all comes down to what is known as Part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging or POST).

Most of us have done it at school by identifying words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Back when the Beatles were at their peak, America and its allies were embroiled in the Vietnam war, Dr Christiaan Barnard carried out the world's first human heart transplant and The Six Day War was fought in the Middle East, NASA launched an unmanned Apollo 4 test spacecraft and Britons got their first colour television programmes . But in that same year the one development that affects more people today and will do in the future is the work of Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis.  They published their classic work Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967), which provided basic analysis about words in texts on what is known today simply as the Brown Corpus.

Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis did more complicated analysis than getting computers to find nouns and verbs but the principle is the same. It is a process largely based on relationships with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. 

Once performed by hand, POS tagging is now done in the context of the son of the Brown Corpus, computational linguistics. It uses algorithms which associate discrete terms, as well as hidden parts of speech, in accordance with a set of descriptive tags or forms of description or, more recently, that are created as they are found ‘on the fly’.

The reason that Kucera and  Francis work is so important is that we have built a whole new form of society on this idea.

Clever scientists have used this idea of extracting hidden meaning to develop a new form of internet.

One of these ideas came from three academics Scott Deerwester, Susan  Dumais, George Furnas, Thomas Landauer and Richard Harshman (1990). They outlined how to analyse relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. Called Latent semantic Analysis (LSA), the idea assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur close together in text.  

This idea is used by all manner of analysis programmes and helps find those hidden meanings.

In their paper they says “...Thus while LSA’s potential knowledge is surely imperfect, we believe it can offer a close enough approximation to people’s knowledge to underwrite theories and tests of theories of cognition.”  Since 1990, academics have come a long way and accuracy is getting ever closer to social reality. 

Today, the use of semantics makes the Google and Bing web search algorithms more accurate, helps newspaper journalists find the most authoritative sources for information and informs the top companies about events and their drivers to optimise financial, marketing and communication decisions.

Remember Kristen Urbahn’s story I blogged about three weeks ago? It has lots of hidden meanings. Using Extractive.com’s special search engine Kristen can find out about the relationships between different parts of the story (using automated Part of Speech tagging).

The results show the nature of some of the significant words:

├PERSON (46) │├SCREEN ACTOR (4) ││└ Kathy Griffin (4) │ ├ she ││ └ her  │├US CABINET MEMBER (1) ││└ Donald Rumsfeld │├US PRESIDENT (3) ││└ Obama (3) ││ ├ Obama ││ ├ Obama ││ └ his  │├ Brian Williams │├ Dan Pfeiffer │├ Jill Jackson (2) │ ├ Jill Jackson │├ Keith (6) │ ├ Keith Urbahn │ ├ He │ │├ Kristen Urbahn (13) │ ├ Kristen Urbahn │ │ ├ her │ ├ Kristen Urbahn │  │ └ Kristen  │├ Maggie Fox │├ Osama Bin Laden (6) │ ├ Osama Bin Laden │ └ Bin Laden  │├ Osama Bin Ladin (5) │ ├ Osama Bin Ladin │ ├ He │ ├ Osama │ └ he  │└ Sohaib Athar

├LOCATION (14) │├GPE (13) ││├COUNTRY (5) │││├ Afghanistan │││├ Pakistan (2) │││ ├ Pakistan  │││└ US (2) ││├CITY (4) │││├ Abbottabad │││├ Denver │││├ Guardian │││└ San Francisco ││└US STATE (4) ││ ├ Kansas ││ ├ South Carolina ││ └ Washington (2) ││  ├ Washington ││  └ Washington  │└ Wiltshire ├ORGANIZATION (21) │├COMMERCIAL ORG (16) ││├MEDIA ORG (7) │││├BROADCAST NETWORK (5) ││││└TV NETWORK (5) ││││ ├ BBC ││││ ├ CBS ││││ ├ CNN (2) ││││ └ NBC │││├ New York Times │││└ Washington Times ││├ Defence ││├ Google ││├ Social Media Group ││└ Twitter (5) ││ ├ Twitter  │├NON GOVERNMENT ORG (2) ││├ Al Qaeda ││└ Republican Leaders Office │└UNIVERSITY (3) │ ├ Preston University │ ├ University of Kentucky │ └ Yale ├CONTACT INFO (1) │└URL (1) │ └HTTP (1) │  └http://goo.gl/qHnFH

├OTHER (18) │├FACILITY (4) ││└BUILDING (4) ││ └ White House (4) ││  ├ White House Communication Director ││  ├ White House  │├LINKED OTHER (11) ││├ Capitol Hill ││├ Christian ││├ Creative Commons ││├ Dachshunds ││├ Internet ││├ Internet ││├ Mobile ││├ POTUS ││├ President Obama ││├ Royal Wedding ││└ The New York Times │└SOFTWARE (3) │ └ Facebook (3) │  ├ Facebook  ├DATE-TIME (16) │├DATE GENERAL (8) ││├DATE (2) │││├ Aug. 18, 2009 │││└ May 1 2011 ││├DAY OF MONTH (1) │││└ 1 May ││├MONTH NAME (1) │││└ May ││├RELATIVE DATE (2) │││├ months ago │││└ the evening ││└YEAR (2) ││ ├ 2006 ││ └ 2011

│└TIME (8) │ ├ 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time │ ├ 10:40 p.m. │ ├ 10:53 │ ├ 11 p.m. │ ├ 11:35 │ ├ 4pm EST │ ├ 9:45 p.m. │ └ from 10:45 p.m.-2:20 a.m. └NUMERIC (20)  ├MEASUREMENT (4)  │└DURATION (4)  │ ├ Five years  │ ├ days  │ ├ former  │ └ the hours  ├NUMBER (11)  │├ 2.0  │├ 3,000  │├ 5,000  │├ 7.24  │├ millions  │├ more than 185  │├ one  │├ one  │├ six  │├ three  │└ two  └ORDINAL (5)   ├ Third   ├ first   ├ first   ├ second   └ third

Here, then, are the key elements that can be extracted from the blog post.

Two people from the 18^th and 19^th centuries now star in this story.

Thomas Bayes (1702–1761) was the son of London Presbyterian minister with a clever mathematical brain. He came up with what can be described as a way to look at these hidden parts of text and other content and find out the extent to which a particular inference is not true. For example Twitter is a big part of the Kristen Urbahn story but it is by no means the focus of the events in Pakistan.  It was just an (important) means by which information was shared across the globe. Thomas’ clever mathematics is the means by which it is possible for computers to make decisions about the probability that information can be relied on and, in that case, the role of Twitter in news distribution.

With enough information and generous computing power, of which modern man has plenty, Bayesian probability offers something like a partial belief, rather than a frequency. This allows the application of probability to all sorts of propositions rather than just ones that come with a known structure. "Bayesian" has been used in this sense since about 1950. Advancements in computing technology have allowed scientists from many disciplines to pair traditional Bayesian statistics with other techniques to greatly increase the use of Bayes theorem in science. Now, computers can both learn from experience and are beginning to be good at prediction.

Twitter was important for the Urbahn story and so, the software might tell us, Twitter will be significant for other stories in the future.

It is such techniques that modern managers need to hand if only to be able to discover emerging trends in communication and or news and events.

Fifty years after Thomas death, George Boole  (1815 – 1864) came into this world to give us all a great way of discovering information.  George (who was married to an equally mathematically brilliant wife Mary and who was the nice of the man who gave Mount Everest its name), gave us Boolean algebra (1854). Today most people know it because it is useful when searching for information using search engines. The Boolean operations AND, OR, and NOT help narrow down searches to get more closely to the facts we seek (Kristen AND Urbahn OR Forcht).

But, the use of AND, OR, and NOT in mathematics and computing has other applications and when combined with Bayesian probability (and other similar math) which means that computers can be used to make accurate, predictive and related inferences and learn, for themselves, from the results.

In practice, we find useful tools to give us insights into events.

For example http://twitris.knoesis.org/  (created at Kno.e.sis at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Wright State University) provides us with an ontology, related Tweets, links to highly relevant web pages, a chart of Tweet rates and much more.

In practice, a manager can keep a close eye on mentions of a company, brand or product and the reputation drivers behind the Twitter stream.

No one is pretending that business managers need to understand all the technologies. There is a need, however, to know that using such advances is now becoming central to modern management and communication.

Bibliography

Kucera, H. and Francis, W.N. (1967) Computational Analysis of Present-day American English Journal: Neuroimage - NEUROIMAGE

Scott Deerwester, Susan T. Dumais, George W. Furnas, Thomas K. Landauer, Richard Harshman (1990). "Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis". Journal of the American Society for Information Science 41 (6): 391–407

 Boole, George (2003) [1854]. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-089-9.

Gruber, Thomas R. (June 1993). "A translation approach to portable ontology Specifications". Knowledge Acquisition5 (2): 199–220.


Further Reading:
Introduction to LSA http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/dp1.LSAintro.pdf
Semantic Inference in the Human-Machine Communication http://www.springerlink.com/content/ju71rcn9pq0wcmy3/
Continuous Semantics to Analyze Real-Time Data http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Continuous_Semantics_to_Analyze_Real_Time_Data
Web semantics and ontology By Johanna Wenny Rahayu http://books.google.com/books?id=K7yFJVu8NDYC


Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more sources come through Gnip's API, normalized and enriched with metadata. http://gnip.com/

Hieroglyph picture: http://apworldhistorywiki.wikispaces.com/Egypt+(complex)+(69-80)+2 

Public Relations - can it be a science in its own right?

Among its many duties, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the association of individual practitioners in the UK, are responsibilities to be involved in research.

Indeed, under its Charter it is mandated to do so.

The objects for which the Institute is incorporated shall be:
to promote the study, research and development of the practice of public
relations and publish or otherwise make available the useful results of
such study and research;

The Institute has established a Research and Development Unit to create a hub for industry and academic research.

The CIPR Research and Development Unit Working Party includes among its members Dr Sandra Oliver (Emeritus Professor), Dr Jon White (Visiting Professor), Dr Reginald Watts (Business Consultant) and Jay O'Connor (CIPR Immediate Past President).

The CIPR website page of research resources provides an insight into the extent to which, so far, its research outcomes are promoted by the CIPR and the extent to which the Institute promotes or makes available studies and commissions research on behalf of its members.

Then there is a mass of  information about Measurement and evaluation including the Measurement & Evaluation Fellowship Award in the UK (more information here); the Measurement and Evaluations toolkit and the social media version; the Valid Metrics guidelines and a page offering links to resources for measuring different sectors of PR accompanied by case studies relevant to the sector.

The Local Public Services Group is to provide members with inspiration, know-how and reassurance to actively participate in public relations activities, by exposing them to the experiences and good practice of key practitioners in the field. This group signposts third party case studies and research and papers.

There does not seem to be a reference to the Alan Rawel Academic Conference at any time in the future.

It will be interesting to see what transpires from the deliberations of Dr Sandra Oliver, Dr Jon White, Dr Reginald Watts and Jay O'Connor but I have some concerns.

Jay O'Connor suggests that the committee will 'bring together what is a significant body of knowledge about PR practice' and Reginald Watts, Chair of the Unit, says: "Together with those practitioners, consultancies and research organisations that are active in PR research, there are many practitioners and researchers with PhDs in subjects directly related to communications. My hope is that we can mobilise such members, along with others, to shape future practice and to help us to understand the changing communications environment. This is an exciting and timely undertaking by the CIPR. We are committed to bridging the gap between professional and academic research in a way that will be both creative and highly relevant to practice."

There is some need for the PR profession to acquire the confidence in its own right to work on blue sky research.

Many pure play public relations areas of interest have huge economic social and political significance and deserve the kind of attention to research that medicine has in the minds of research funders.

Some example include:

The wider nature of communication like ubiquitous internet as well as new forms of human/machine communicative interaction (like, for example, body/avata languages using the Kinect type of technologies) become the norm in human and human/machine relationships.

The extent to which we understand the drivers of relationships and the extent to which relationships affect matters such as reputation and recognition of entities (e.g. brands, companies, other institutions and machines) are poorly understood. To-date, our understanding is based on research that accepts that relationships exist now how and why they form (social sciences), are evolutionary (Psychology/evolutionary sciences) or are robotic and are not truly helpful in the reality of organisational relationship management.

In my line of interest, the significance of semantics, personal data (and the relationship between control of institutions in some form of digital democracy to control the emerging internet executive/s) are becoming significant for the profession. People offer a cloud of data about themselves and yet there is no means by which a form of vox populi democracy can challenge the owners of such data (governments, utilities and service vendors).

Value based relationship issues, where everything from corporate objectives to website meta tags affect the capability of organisations to operate without creating inherent dissonance with organisational constituents is poorly understood.

The nature of diversity and ethics in relationships are also major areas of emerging concern where we depend on education and social grooming to release value from human interest and development and yet are amazed at the capability of the dispossessed to invent and provide.

Then, again, there are the issues associated with the nature of trust in relationships. If the worlds banking system, and the government of huge swaths of the global population break down for want of of trust, surely the PR industry should be at the heart of research into trust.

Of course there is a case for having practice based research and there is a case for using and even adopting the better cases of research from other sciences but there is also a case for a public relations science in its own right.

I just hope that the Institute should consider such an ambition and be bold in its considerations.

Online Public Relations research tools

It has occurred to me that I have never shown the PR industry, and notably academic researchers, the technologies I, and my students and commercial partners have used to come to the conclusions we do.

I make them available to you here and now.

Some are quite old and have been superseded by better technologies and I am very happy to help researchers who want to use these tools in research activities that will give the PR industry better insights into the nature of online communication.

Semantic Web Experiments

We have been working on Latent Semantic Indexing for nearly a decade but now we are looking at a range of 

other ways the semantic web can offer practitioners insights.

This is an experiment that dynamically identifies an ontology. The objective here will be to allow the practitioner to drill down further and further to find out who is affected and involved with an entity in a web page (e.g. news story).

You can try it out for yourself her http://entitymap.appspot.com/

Reputation Wall

This is a development we have taken a very long way. It searches for pages about a search topic, opens up the web pages, normalises the texts, parses the texts of all the pages for semantic concepts (latent semantic indexing - we have our own software to do this) and then looks for the most powerful concepts month by month going back a year.

You can create your own 'Reputation Wall' here http://reputationwall.appspot.com

Track This Now

A media story or picture comes to prominance and you want to now where in the world it is popular right now. Well, here is the service that gives you an instant world and regional snap shot.

You can find your news of the moment here

http://www.trackthisnow.com/

Finding Semantic Concepts

This tool was used to discover relationships between people and organisations in a big research project. You can enter a lot of website URL's into it and it will return the 50 most significant semantic concepts in the corpora. 

 I find it is more manageable if you remove the URL's and then paste the words into a programme like TagCrowd to generate a semantic word map.

You can use this software from here http://www.netreputation.co.uk/summariser/getconcepts.php

Value Systems Analysis

This software levers the semantic analysis of pages and looks at bigger corpora. In this case current Google News, Blogs and natural search. The analysis shows values in bold in the texts. 

The software was developed as a series of software developments for academic research. In this case the  software was part of the development for building the values theory in PR. The outcome was presented at theBled symposium in 2009:

A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs. 
David Phillips, Bruno Amaral (DOC, 977 KB) 
A proof of concept for automated discourse analysis in support of identification of relationship building in blogs. 
David Phillips, Bruno Amaral (PPT, 1.5MB)

You can have a go here http://www.netreputation.co.uk/values/

Web Page Text Analysis

One of the hard things to do is to re-construct web pages to extract the text and then find the sematic concepts

and much more.

This tool is really clever because it shows the steps involved. You can extract the text on web pages with this tool too.

http://keeneuk.appspot.com/textanalyse

Video News

Finding the latest video is harder than you think. There are so many channels.

We thought that it would be a good idea to have them all in one place and this was the first part of developing a special type of search which you can see in NewsRokit.

You can play with the software here http://crowdmint.appspot.com/

Google Hourly Search to CSV

Everyone want to get a spreadsheet of the latest pages indexed by Google. This toy allows you to just the last

hour's worth of pages indexed by Google.

To try it yourself here is the URL http://search2csv.appspot.com/

Summariser

Did you want to make a quick summary of a web page?

This may help.

http://www.netreputation.co.uk/summariser/summari.php

Throughout, these experimental tools do not use word counts. The approach is always to use latent semantic indexing as the basis for experimentation.

Have fun with the technologies.